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Democracy can be its own tyranny though. Which is why the rep system was so problematic.

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The greatest lie is to convince people that the world is a dangerous place and a zero sum game where you are never safe. Distrust others and fight them for scraps, while the real enemy that spreads this lie takes the whole pie.Avatar and Sig courtesy of TheEroKing
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Negrep was just about being able to anonymously flame people without letting them respond to you. So, I'm glad it's gone. 'Reputation' is not neccessary, and people should have to actually communicate.

One thing has changed for sure though, nobody is bitching about being negrepped anymore.

Quote:

Originally Posted by achirist

Negrep was just about being able to anonymously flame people without letting them respond to you. So, I'm glad it's gone. 'Reputation' is not neccessary, and people should have to actually communicate.

I think that was the biggest weak-point of the Reputation System.
Anyone could rate whoever they wanted, but if that rating was negative or even more, negative without any specific reason (Troll, bad mood, ...), the one rated got a black spot on his/her virtual reputation for everyone out there to see and got a bad impression, even if he/she did not actually do something bad/wrong.

Everyone has the right to express his/her own opinion as long as it follows the Forum's rules. Disagreeing shouldn't be made by thumbing someone down/giving negative reputation, but commenting it out and coming to a solution together. However, if a certain someone does break the rules, that again shouldn't be expressed by negative reputation, but the Mods and Admins should take care of that by, in the worst case, issuing a ban or taking any kind of other action. However, again, they should not give a black mark on someone that wouldn't go away and it would be for everyone to see.

Main point: At forums, the source of the message/post should be looked at, not how high/low the poster's reputation is. With the removal of the reputation system, that was more or less made possible.

Since the abolishment of the Reputation system, I feel that the discussions - at least on those threads I frequent - have become noticeably less engaging. Several people who in my opinion wrote longer, well-thought-out postings in the past have either reduced their commitments or stopped posting altogether. The threads have become quieter, and with the exception of people heatedly debating with each other 1:1, the intensity has decreased. More 1-2 liner ditto posts.

(Then again, this is a subjective impression, I have no objective numbers to back up my claim)

Is this what the Board community wanted to achieve? If so, it was a full success. I'm not happy about it.

Since the abolishment of the Reputation system, I feel that the discussions - at least on those threads I frequent - have become noticeably less engaging. Several people who in my opinion wrote longer, well-thought-out postings in the past have either reduced their commitments or stopped posting altogether. The threads have become quieter, and with the exception of people heatedly debating with each other 1:1, the intensity has decreased. More 1-2 liner ditto posts.

(Then again, this is a subjective impression, I have no objective numbers to back up my claim)

Is this what the Board community wanted to achieve? If so, it was a full success. I'm not happy about it.

Yeah, the Reputation System was sort of a "pusher".
It pursuit members to think carefully before posting, but was that really good?
Sure, the posts were more quality-written in the end, but the style was just military-like.

Let's not forget that these forums focus on Anime, which is entertainment.
The forums about entertainment should not bring fear and feeling of uneasiness of what is going to happen if I don't do something.

On the other hand, without the Reputation System, members open up more, from which we can see just what kind of posts they like to make; short and spam-like, or long and main-point focused.
For example, I've been here since December 2012, but I see that relentlessflame always tries to keep purely on-topic and his posts are rounded up, just the way Reputation System peeps would want, although there is no Reputation System around.

Keeping things short, I think that the overall feeling is better if the forums are more opened and free, although I very much respect your opinion.

The rep system was really unnecessary, though getting rid of it now I don't feel it has really changed much with the forum, at least the parts I frequent.

When it was in effect I felt the fear of negative rep would keep more timid posters from daring to disagree with the fanboy herd. I never really cared, honestly, even though I'd get bombed with neg-rep every time I posted something "unpopular" on a subject or series that fans considered "holy" or whatever.

I'm sure if rep still existed, my recent posts in an Evangelion related thread would have netted me a metric ton's worth of negatives...

@Haiprbim
I have no problem with the what you proposed - it was in the very first suggestions in this thread. As long as it remains private with no public display of it whatsoever.

That is basically a quick way of giving someone a personal feedback, so I'm in agreement with that.
However, if we would keep it personal, stocking the positive and negative feedback in an overall count would be useless, so that part could be taken away as well.

At any rate I don't think it is necessarily a bad thing if there are less people that make suggestions only to farm. I've always thought that there were many cases of suggestions that seemed a bit off, it is better if people recommend what they truly feel it is recommendable, and not listing anime for the sake of answering.

Since the abolishment of the Reputation system, I feel that the discussions - at least on those threads I frequent - have become noticeably less engaging. Several people who in my opinion wrote longer, well-thought-out postings in the past have either reduced their commitments or stopped posting altogether. The threads have become quieter, and with the exception of people heatedly debating with each other 1:1, the intensity has decreased. More 1-2 liner ditto posts.

(Then again, this is a subjective impression, I have no objective numbers to back up my claim)

Is this what the Board community wanted to achieve? If so, it was a full success. I'm not happy about it.

I respect this viewpoint, and I do see some evidence of it over the past couple of weeks, but I honestly think this is mostly a matter of what's airing right now.

In my experience, certain anime shows simply lend themselves to a wider and more in-depth range of discussion. Shows like Psycho-Pass and Shin Sekai Yori, for two examples, make for excellent conversation pieces, as there's a lot of "meaty" philosophical and cultural discussions that can be had based on them.

Psycho-Pass and SSY recently finished airing, and (so far) none of the new Spring 2013 anime shows strike me as being as strong as conversation pieces as Psycho-Pass and SSY were (although I have some hope that Gargantia will become this).

Since the abolishment of the Reputation system, I feel that the discussions - at least on those threads I frequent - have become noticeably less engaging. Several people who in my opinion wrote longer, well-thought-out postings in the past have either reduced their commitments or stopped posting altogether. The threads have become quieter, and with the exception of people heatedly debating with each other 1:1, the intensity has decreased. More 1-2 liner ditto posts.

(Then again, this is a subjective impression, I have no objective numbers to back up my claim)

Is this what the Board community wanted to achieve? If so, it was a full success. I'm not happy about it.

I think this happened to a certain extent, and the reputation system is partly behind it. It takes a fair amount of time and effort to write very long posts. With the reputation system you might receive positive reputation from many people for such posts, which was encouraging to continue going. Even though people couldn't +rep each post due to the need to "spread it around," receiving even that initial set alerted you to the fact that other people were reading what you wrote and were "cheering you on," in a way. Now that there's no reputation and "I agree" posts are frowned upon, it's much more empty. You can write a huge post and all you might get back is someone who disagrees with you. You can engage the dissenter(s), but you don't get the spectator/cheerleader effect that the reputation system provided. It's a bit harder to bring a lot of energy to it.

The other part of the equation is the moderation. I think they've become much quicker and responsive about defusing topics that get heated or enter the "cyclical" pattern (which seems to be a back-and-forth between a small group of members who enter the phase of arguing over minutiae). It keeps the peace, for certain, but also results in tamer, less passionate discussions. I've even seen a few cases where forum participants lightly debated about even starting to debate, because they thought that the conversation would get shut down by moderators fairly quickly.

Whether these developments are a good thing or a bad thing is subjective; the forum goes on regardless.

In the end, you take the good with the bad. It's possibly true that some good debaters were encouraged to soldier on thanks to reputation boosts. But it's also true that people who weren't necessarily "good debaters" were being encouraged by the same system, just because people liked having their (perhaps disruptive/impolite/inappropriate/trolling/whatever) point of view voiced by someone else so they don't have to. It's not like the person giving you rep had to have a good or valid reason to do so. And likewise, good debaters with valid points of view were also being silenced by negative rep just because their opinion went against the grain (whether "the grain" was reasonable or not). I argued for the longest time that this is exactly why people shouldn't get so hung up about pointless neg rep because it was all pointless... but you get what you get. Like every feedback mechanism, it can be used for good and for ill, and with the way people were using it, the bad seemed to outweigh the good.

In the end, the fundamentals of having conversation on a forum shouldn't depend on getting anonymous shots in the arm. There were days before rep, and there will continue to be days after it. Being part of this community of people is more important than the temporary "feel-good" of a +1.

I can't imagine that rep really encouraged people to post better at least to a significant degree. In generally, when I got repped it used to be for medium length posts that had some point to them, or just some jokes. It's rarely if ever the really the long meaningful posts that I bothered to put a lot of effort in. That's usually because repping is a spurr of the moment thing. Who goes "Dude, that was truly meaningful, I'm going to go back later to rep (or neg them!)"?

Plus as much as many would hate to admit, one is more likely to rep posts they agree with.

In the end, to be a true vain egomaniac, rep was just not sufficient enough. It was easy to reach tier 1 with sufficient grinding, and if I really need to go higher would be to engineer crises where some locally unpopular tool appears to be slightly more extreme then I am, causing me to appear to be a voice of reason and racking up points of sympathy. Really, the bars grow boring after the 4th one. It is fair more flattering to make a post, and hear the multitudes of fans out there echoing with a resounding force while the haters try in vain to save some face, as for the rest... they're just fortunate to be able to briefly reside in the light of your presence. But those come in actual, non anonymous replies on the threads and walls.

In the end, the bars wouldn't really suggest I am better than everyone, regardless of high they got. I am better than everyone just because I am. Better at what? Obviously the best in the world at what I do.

__________________

The greatest lie is to convince people that the world is a dangerous place and a zero sum game where you are never safe. Distrust others and fight them for scraps, while the real enemy that spreads this lie takes the whole pie.Avatar and Sig courtesy of TheEroKing
Guild Wars 2 SN: ArchonWing.9480 (Stormbluff Isle)MyAnimeList || Reviews

Last edited by Archon_Wing; 2013-05-03 at 21:07.
Reason: clearly, grammar is not the thing...